A dust collector is an equipment to remove particles in an industrial fume. Typically the collector contains between hundreds to thousands of cylindrical elements referred to as bags. The bags are made of a filtration fabric that is porous. As the gas flows through, the porous filtration fabric collects particles. The particles can form a cake on the surface after minutes of operation, and the bags are typically cleaned by a reversed jet.
One of the important parameters of the filtration fabric is the filtration efficiency. The efficiency of filtration of bags is related to the total surface area. Typically, if the surface area is increased, then the velocity of gas and particles going through the fabric will be reduced, which decreases the probability of undesired particles going through the fabric and can consequently reduces the particle emissions. Moreover, a higher surface area can reduce the probability of particles getting embedded into the fabric in a manner where they resist the reversed jet, thereby increasing the lifespan of the filter. It is also possible, by increasing the surface area, to increase the capacity of a dust collector. It is thus generally sought to increase the surface area of the bags in dust collectors, where possible.
Typically, pleated bags have a greater surface area than non-pleated bags (i.e. simply cylindrical bags). Using pleated bags instead of non-pleated bags is thus one way of increasing the surface area without necessarily increasing the overall size of the dust collector system. In many cases, replacement of non-pleated bags by pleated bags can increase the surface area by two to three times.
Pleated bags can be made using a pleatable material which keeps its shape after pleating. The pleating can be done with a pleating machine. Some pleating machines operate at room temperature.
Alternately, for some materials which require thermosetting to retain their pleats, pleating machines having heating blades are used to fold the fabric and keep pressure on the pleats until the fabric is cooled back to room temperature. Heretofore, such processes have been used with polymers that can be thermally formed and have a relatively small density.
Some materials that are not thermally formable per se can be made so by adding a thermo-setting resin. An example of this is fiberglass felt impregnated with phenolic resin. The temperature of blades allow setting of the phenolic resin which subsequently acts to maintain the shape of the pleats. The reaction being irreversible, the pleats subsequently keep their shape even at high temperature.
However, even given the state of the art, some filtration materials could not be pleated by the known means and therefore remained known as being unpleatable. Nevertheless, given some desired characteristics, at least one of these ‘unpleatable’ filtration materials remained a popular choice for some specific applications despite the fact that it was not available in pleated form. There thus remained a strong need for an equivalent to such ‘unpleatable’ materials in pleated form due to the many advantages of pleats in filtration. This called for improvement.